Living Against the Clock; Does Loss of Daily Rhythms Cause Obesity?

ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2012) — When Thomas Edison tested the first light bulb in 1879, he could never have imagined that his invention could one day contribute to a global obesity epidemic. Electric light allows us to work, rest and play at all hours of the day, and a paper published this week in Bioessays suggests that this might have serious consequences for our health and for our waistlines.

Daily or “circadian” rhythms including the sleep wake cycle, and rhythms in hormone release are controlled by a molecular clock that is present in every cell of the human body. This human clock has its own inbuilt, default rhythm of almost exactly 24 hours that allows it to stay finely tuned to the daily cycle generated by the rotation of Earth. This beautiful symmetry between the human clock and the daily cycle of Earth’s rotation is disrupted by exposure to artificial light cycles, and by irregular meal, work and sleep times. This mismatch between the natural circadian rhythms of our bodies and the environment is called “circadian desynchrony.”for more of this article, click here:

What Is Dysphoric Mania?

Two weeks before he killed 12 people and injured 58 during a midnight shooting rampage in a Colorado movie theater, James Holmes texted a classmate asking if she had heard of “dysphoric mania.” When she replied asking if it was something treatable, he replied, “It was,” and said she should stay away from him “because I am bad news.”

The New York Times article that broke this story says, “The psychiatric condition [dysphoric mania], a form of bipolar disorder, combines the frenetic energy of mania with the agitation, dark thoughts and in some cases paranoid delusions of major depression.” This description is vivid enough to give readers a glimpse of what might be going on in the mind of a person such as Holmes (we have to be careful about making psychiatric judgments based entirely on the observations of others). It’s a bit misleading, though. For one thing, agitation and paranoia can be symptoms of mania as well as depression.Also, dysphoric mania isn’t a “form” of bipolar disorder. Rather, it’s a specific type of episode that has mixed features – one where mania symptoms are combined with depression symptoms like the social withdrawal described in the Times article. (See the last paragraph in part 1 of Bipolar Depression Symptoms, Social Withdrawal.)One problem in understanding all this is the elusive definition of the term “dysphoria.” Dictionaries disagree, using terms from depression and discontent to anguish and agitation to simply “sadness.” At bottom, the definition changes depending on the context, and in this case, the dysphoria in “dysphoric mania” isn’t the same as the dysphoria in “dysphoric depression.”

Thanks for reading Soft Bipolar Cyclothymia News from Boise Bipolar Center. Please see the video on preventing suicide “Stay Here” at:Youtube Soft Bipolar CyclothymiaPass it on to all bipolars you know. Bipolar disorder is the leading cause of all suicides and inoculate yourself and others. Stay on planet Earth. We need you.

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ScienceDaily (July 11, 2012) — What can explain extreme differences in altruism among individuals, from Ebenezer Scrooge to Mother Teresa? It may all come down to variation in the size and activity of a brain region involved in appreciating others’ perspectives, according to a study published in the July 12th issue of the journal Neuron. The findings also provide a neural explanation for why altruistic tendencies remain stable over time.

“This is the first study to link both brain anatomy and brain activation to human altruism,” says senior study author Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich. “The findings suggest that the development of altruism through appropriate training or social practices might occur through changes in the brain structure and the neural activations that we identified in our study.”Individuals who excel at understanding others’ intents and beliefs are more altruistic than those who struggle at this task. The ability to understand others’ perspectives has previously been associated with activity in a brain region known as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Based on these past findings, Fehr and his team reasoned that the size and activation of the TPJ would relate to individual differences in altruism.In the new study, subjects underwent a brain imaging scan and played a game in which they had to decide how to split money between themselves and anonymous partners. Subjects who made more generous decisions had a larger TPJ in the right hemisphere of the brain compared with subjects who made stingy decisions.Moreover, activity in the TPJ reflected each subject’s specific cutoff value for the maximal cost the subject was willing to endure to increase the partner’s payoff. Activity in the TPJ was higher during hard decisions — when the personal cost of an altruistic act was just below the cutoff value — than during easy decisions associated with a very low or very high cost.“The structure of the TPJ strongly predicts an individual’s setpoint for altruistic behavior, while activity in this brain region predicts an individual’s acceptable cost for altruistic actions,” says study author Yosuke Morishima of the University of Zurich. “We have elucidated the relationship between the hardware and software of human altruistic behavior.”

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these 3 articles are from Huffington Post

Porn-Brain Study: Erotic Movies Make Brain Regions ‘Shut Down’

Watching pornography would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But new research finds that looking at erotic movies can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli.Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal.Turns out, the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene, said study researcher Gert Holstege, a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands.“If you look, for example, at your computer and you have to write something or whatever, then you have to look specifically and carefully at what you’re doing because if you don’t, it means you make mistakes,” Holstege told LiveScience. “But the moment you are watching explicit sexual movies, that’s not necessary, because you know exactly what’s going on. It’s not important that the door is green or yellow.”Anxiety vs. arousalThe brain can either be anxious or aroused (or neither), Holstege said, but not both. During orgasm, he has found, activity in brain regions associated with anxiety plummets. This phenomenon may explain why women with low levels of sexual desire often have high levels of anxiety, Holstege said. It makes sense; if you’re looking around, focusing on visual details, scanning for danger, it may not be so easy to focus on arousal, he said. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos and Bizarre Facts]“If you yourself are in a very dangerous situation, whatever the reason, you don’t have sexual feelings, because you have to survive for yourself, not survive for the species,” Holstege said.Brain-scan research had previously turned up hints that explicit sexual images might quiet a brain area called Brodmann’s area 17, also called the primary visual cortex, a region that does the first processing of incoming visual information in the brain. The data was spotty, however, and no one had looked into the question in women’s brains.As part of a broader series of brain-scanning studies, Holstege examined the primary visual cortexes of 12 healthy heterosexual premenopausal women. All of the women were on hormonal birth control, smoothing out any menstrual-cycle related changes in sexual desire or arousal.

Each woman watched three videos while having her brain imaged by positron emission tomography, better known as a PET scan. These scans detect minute changes in radioactivity in the brain that correspond to the amount of blood flowing to any given region. Regions with more blood flowing to them are considered more active.One of the videos used in the study was a simple nature documentary about marine life in the Caribbean. The other two were selections from “women-friendly” pornographic movies, one depicting only foreplay and manual stimulation and the other depicting oral sex and vaginal intercourse. Earlier studies had shown that the higher-intensity video showing intercourse produced stronger physical arousal in women than the foreplay-focused movie clip. [6 Great Things Sex Can Do For You]Safe sexThe scan results revealed that the high-intensity erotic video — and only the high-intensity erotic video — resulted in far less blood being sent to the primary visual cortex. The region is still active, just much less so. Usually, that effect is only seen when people are asked to conduct a nonvisual task, like remembering words, while also watching some sort of visual stimuli.To Holstege, those results suggest that the brain is focusing on sexual arousal as more important than visual processing during these erotic films.“You have to realize that the brain wants to spare as much energy as possible, so if some part of the brain is not necessary at a high level of functioning, it immediately goes down,” Holstege said.The findings have implications for sexual dysfunction, Holstege said, as they paint a picture of the brain in which safety is paramount and anxiety is a libido-killer.“If you want to have sex, as a man, you need to produce a safe situation for the woman,” Holstege said. “That is what you want, that is the most important thing.”Holstege reported his results online April 10 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

This article accompanies the prior article on impacts of trauma and bullying and the brain. In that group of excerpts, being “born” into stress from parents in stress or trauma was covered. You can actually be born with predisposition to ptsd and have the “alertness” hormones active at birth. These articles discuss what is transmitted from the view point of Holocaust victims and soldiers both. War trauma can be passed on to children, transgenerational trauma, but further, studies show the trauma moves down generations to include three full generations.

This poses interesting questions: if a child of stress grandparents is born with both the physical and mental predisposition of ptsd, can it show up early, even if the parents and home are currently stable, and then could that then open up bipolar mood disorder very early. Personally, I think that is plausible and an explanation for very young children where a chaotic bipolar disorder has opened up early.Charles Bunch, Ph.D.comments copyright

Is There Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma? The Case of CombatVeterans’ ChildrenRachel Dekel, PhDBar-Ilan UniversityHadass Goldblatt, PhDUniversity of HaifaThis article is a review of the literature on intergenerational transmission of posttraumatic stress disorder(PTSD) from fathers to sons in families of war veterans. The review addresses several questions: (1)Which fathers have a greater tendency to transmit their distress to their offspring? (2) What is transmittedfrom father to child? (3) How is the distress transmitted and through which mechanisms? And finally, (4)Which children are more vulnerable to the transmission of PTSD distress in the family? Whereas theexisting literature deals mainly with fathers’ PTSD as a risk for increased emotional and behaviorproblems among the children, this review also highlights the current paucity of knowledge regardingfamily members and extrafamilial systems that may contribute to intergenerational transmission of PTSDor to its moderation. Little is also known about resilience and strengths that may mitigate or prevent therisk of intergenerational transmission of trauma.Keywords: PTSD, war, fathers, secondary traumatization, intergenerational transmission

Third Generation Survivors: Themes and CharacteristicsReview of the above research suggests that although some survivors and their childrenhave become successful in their everyday lives, emotional issues from the Holocaust maycontinue to impact future generations. While much effort has been placed on how the secondgeneration has been affected by living in a home with a parent who survived the Holocaust,research about the third generation survivors and what role the Holocaust has played in theirlives remains in its infancy.The third generation, the grandchildren of the first generation survivors, proves to be ofimportance since in many families they are the last generation to have contact with the firstgeneration survivors. Although third generation survivors have not had direct contact with theactual traumas of the Holocaust, there is varying evidence regarding whether this generationcontinues to experience traumatic symptoms related to the Holocaust (Bar-On et al., 1998;Rowland-Klein & Dunlop, 1998).The following section will provide a comprehensive review of the literature on thirdgeneration survivors. More specifically, some of the themes that have surfaced in the researchon the third generation such as coping, transmission of trauma, and family values will beaddressed. Finally, a look at the psychopathology of this generation will be analyzed and a fewstatements from third generation survivors will be provided as well as a meta-analysis that22examined whether vicarious traumatization skipped a generation and directly went to the thirdgeneration. This section will conclude with a look at what gaps remain and what othercontributions this study will aim to meet in an effort expand on the literature on futuregenerations of Holocaust survivors.

Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma across Three Generations: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

This qualitative study reports a preliminary investigation of the intergenerational transmission of trauma across three generations, and across three types of trauma. Representatives of three families in which the first generation had experienced a trauma were examined. Trauma included experiencing the Holocaust, being placed in a transit camp following immigration from Morocco, and being forced to dislocate as the result of a war. The representatives of successive generations were administered qualitative, open–ended interviews regarding their life as survivors or victims, or as the second/third generation of survivors/victims. A content analysis revealed that the intergenerational transmission of three types of trauma was perpetuated across three generations.

The study of how trauma is transmitted is still in the early stage (Baranosky, Young, Johnson-Douglas, Williams-Keeler & MacCarrey, 1998). Baranowsky et al., (1998) explains the phenomenon of trauma transmission in Holocaust-survivor offspring as follows:

“These offspring, the ‘second generation’ from the trauma, may thus bear ‘the scar without the wound” (p.248).

1.Empathic traumatisation. This term is used to describe the offspring’s attempts to understand their parents’ wartime experiences and pain as a means of establishing a connection with them. In doing so, the offspring imagines Holocaust scenes that they attempt to successfully escape or survive. The offspring literally maintains familial ties by integrating their parents’ experiences.

2.Children adopt their parents’ trauma through one of two types of parental communication, namely an obsessive retelling of Holocaust stories, and silence.

3.Intergenerational transmission of trauma occurs when the traumatized parent implants his or her own emotional instability into their children.

4.The female offspring of trauma victims are more likely to unknowingly adopt the trauma-related symptoms of their mothers.

5.Survivor parents attempt to teach their children how to survive in the event of further persecution; thus they inadvertently transmit their own traumatic experiences. These children then often act out the trauma-survival behavior adopted by their parents and become highly sensitive to trauma imagery during same-age anniversaries of their parents’ trauma.

Four working models

In their discussion of mechanisms of trauma transmission, Ancharoff et al., (1998) propose the following four working models:

Silence. Silence can often communicate traumatic messages as powerfully as words could. Silences in the family may develop in one of two ways. To avoid arousing further distress, family members may work hard to shun issues they believe might trigger discomfort and further symptomatology in the parent. Secondly, the parents’ behavior might inhibit discussions about sensitive issues.

Over-disclosure. It is distressing to hear traumatic details without a concomitant effect. Parents may make graphic disclosures of trauma-related information to prepare their children how to survive in a world in which they believe there is no trust and where danger is omnipresent.

Identification.Children who live with a traumatized parent may be continually exposed to post-trauma reactions, which can be unpredictable and frightening. These children tend to feel responsible for their parents’ distress and feel that if they could just be good enough, their parents would not be so sad or angry. Children of combat veterans for example, identify with their fathers’ experience in order to know him better. They attempt to feel what he feels, possibly leading to the development of parallel symptomatology.

Re-enactment.Trauma survivors tend to re-enact their trauma. People close to trauma survivors could find themselves thinking, feeling, and behaving as if they too had been traumatized or were perpetrators.

SECONDARY trauma

People are traumatizedeither directly or indirectly. The DSM-IV (APA, 1994) includes the following phrase in its description of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder):

“It implies inter alia to learn about unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury

experienced by a family member or other close associates” (p.424).

People can thus be traumatized without actually being physically harmed or threatened with harm, simply by learning about the traumatic event. Thus, simply the knowledge that a loved one has been exposed to a traumatic event, could be traumatizing. Against this background, Yehuda et al.,(1998) argue that we can consider the possibility that offspring might indeed develop PTSD symptoms in response to hearing about their parents’ trauma, particularly if these children subjectively stated that such information elicited fear, helplessness or horror.

Compassion fatigue

The term compassion fatigue is also important with regard to the rest of this discussion. Figley (1995) definesthis term as follows:

“The natural behaviors and emotions that arise from knowing about a traumatizing event experienced by a

significant other – the stress from helping or wanting to help a traumatized person” (p.xiv).

According to Figley (1995), it appears as if secondary traumatic stress/compassion fatigue is the syndrome that puts most therapists at risk. Ironically, the most effective therapists are most vulnerable to this mirroring or contagion effect. Baranowsky et al., (1998) refer to Holocaust Memorial Museum staff exposed to personal artifacts, survivor histories and archival materials, who reported a range of stress reactions, including states of emotional numbing, social withdrawal, grief reactions, nightmares, and anger.

Against this background, one could appropriately pose the following question with Baranowsky et al.,(1998):

“If trauma is so volatile as to leave its mark on a therapist who meets a client for a limited period of time, or museum staff who come in contact with historical material alone, we must ask what happens to the offspring of trauma victims who interact with these individuals on a daily basis” (p.249).

EXAMPLES of TRAUMA transmission

Aarts (1998) relates the following example. Previously a conscientious and timid student, Jonathan at the age of 15 had suddenly begun to cause serious problems at school. He disturbed his classes and refused to do his homework. After he had been expelled from one school, his father enrolled him at another. His misconduct persisted, however. Jonathan’s parents responded with utter helplessness. His father explained in one session that he gave in to Jonathan’s demands for money because he might otherwise steal it, which he eventually did. Both Jonathan’s parents had been interned in Japanese concentration camps as young children. At the age of five, Jonathan’s father Paul was caught stealing some sugar-cane by a female inmate of the camp. The woman severely battered and nearly suffocated Paul by forcing a wooden stick down his throat. He remembers his mother watching the scene from nearby without trying to interfere. After the Japanese capitulation, Paul’s father, whom he could hardly remember, joined the family but was soon recruited by the Dutch army to fight the Indonesian Independence Movement. The family emigrated to The Netherlands when Paul was 15 years old. Paul’s father, like many immigrants from the Dutch Indies, had to accept a job much below his former standards. Feeling humiliated, he loudly and frequently complained about his fate. For reasons Paul never quite understood, his father also felt disappointed with and betrayed by the Dutch military command. He left the care of Paul and his siblings entirely to his wife, completely yielding to her wishes. He showed no recognition of Paul’s achievements at school. Instead, he sometimes seemed jealous of Paul’s progress at school.

Nader (1998) refers to the fact that studies have pointed out that there is an increased vulnerability during exposure to a traumatic experience as a result of a parent’s previous trauma. In this regard, it was found that between one and three years after participation in the 1982 war in Lebanon, Israeli combat veterans whose parents were Holocaust survivors, showed higher rates of PTSD and greater numbers of PTSD symptoms than their combat-veteran counterparts whose parents were not survivors of the Holocaust. The decrease in PTSD symptoms over time was also greater for soldiers with non-survivor parents.

Typical symptoms/behavioUr of the traumatiSed survivor parent

General characteristics

In studies done on World War II prisoners of war and their families, Bernstein (1998) and Op den Velde (1998) listed the following aspects as typical with regard to prisoners of war in their relationships to their families:

§A lack of emotional involvement with others.

§Compulsive work habits that lead to a lack of social interaction.

§A fear of closeness, related to wartime loss of friends, thoughts, and nightmares of combat, deaths,

beatings, starvation, and isolation.

§Denial, suppression and repression as coping mechanisms.

§Feelings of guilt and anger.

§Hyper-arousal, leading to increased startle reactions, feelings of fear, stress and ever-present

agitation.

§A desire to keep silent about frightening and life-threatening experiences and putting up a brave front.

§Sleep disturbance and recurrent dreams of traumatic events.

§Feelings of detachment and diminished interest.

§Emotional distance within marriage.

§Difficulties in these persons’ response to the physical illness of friends and family.

§Mood swings without appreciable precipitants.

§Sudden anger outbursts.

§Extended work hours prior to retirement.

§A high prevalence of psychiatric morbidity.

§Neurotic over-activity combined with tenseness and irritability, as well as psychosomatic syndromes

such as hypertension, myocardial infarction, asthma, and gastric ulcers in high frequency.

§Living in the past and present at the same time – trying to survive in the present, and struggling to

separate themselves from the grief, guilt, anger and fear of the past.

§In retirement, fears of illness and death of family members emerge, leading to feelings of

abandonment. This could intensify behavior such as withdrawal, depression, alcoholism, and marital

conflicts.

Children’s needs may reactivate traumatic history

Parents that are survivors often convey traumatic themes in non-verbal ways. Their children must then organize the stories of atrocities and massive trauma to which they have been exposed. Their parents’ stories of violence that are threatening and traumatizing per se, could become fused with their own aggression. It could also become screens onto which this aggression is projected, while these stories simultaneously shape and organize their fantasies and instinctive lives. The result of this process is then very often that these children’s normative development needs and conflicts may reactivate the parents’ traumatic histories (Auerhahn & Laub, 1998).

Consequently, the risk of intergenerational transmission of trauma during the adolescence phase is very high. This phase appears to be a most difficult time for both the traumatized parent and his/her children in terms of identity development in the child (Ancharoff et al., 1998). In this regard, Aarts (1998) points out that themes bound to become pivotal in each child’s development, such as aggression, shame, guilt, attachment and loss, intensify the parents’ post-traumatic struggles. In response, the parents are then often either too permissive or too strict, or even sadistic with their child.

Parents may reactivate their children’s trauma

Op den Velde (1998) states that traumatized parents could directly stimulate the continued existence of trauma in their children. Some of the children who were studied displayed re-experiencing symptoms that contained the psychotraumatic experiences of their parents. In all cases, these symptoms included nightmares and flashbacks with extraordinary clarity. The children’s avoidance symptoms were related to situations that are associated with the traumatic experiences of the parent. These children exhibited a complete clinical picture of PTSD, without having had war experiences themselves.

Symptoms could appear only years later

There is often a period of latency – a seemingly symptomless interval. In about half of the veterans in one study, PTSD manifested more than 20 years after the end of the war. In some cases, this latency period can be described as pathological adaptation to so-called normality and repression of traumatic war experiences (Op den Velde, 1998).

Aarts (1998) relates the case of a man who was incarcerated by the Japanese during World War II and who worked on the Burma railroad. After the war he repeatedly claimed to be totally unaffected by it. He was always strong and healthy and would never give in to any emotion. Then, shortly after his fiftieth birthday, he broke down.

Extreme parental over-protectiveness

Should their children experience trauma, some traumatized or previously traumatized parents tend to become over-protective of their children following the traumatic event. This is often in association with anxiety (Nader, 1998; Kupelianet al., 1998).

Impairment of parenting capacities

A study by Daud et al.,(2005) indicated that children from families where at least one parent had experienced extreme trauma (such as torture) display psychopathological symptoms. There is also a relationship between children’s and parents’ symptoms in these families. The results of this study also support the view that psychiatric and psychological problems may indeed impair the parenting capacities of persons that have experienced grievous and prolonged trauma.

One study examined mothers with a history of abuse and found maternal hyperactivity to infant stimuli (Möhler et al.,2001). It was also found that abused mothers rarely identify their infants’ emotional signals correctly, while their empathic responsiveness and affective reactivity have been shown to be lowered.

The shattering of fundamental assumptions

The psychological sequelae of trauma stem from the shattering of three fundamental assumptions about the world and the self: the world is benevolent, the world is meaningful, and the self is worthy. After the traumatic experience, the world is no longer considered safe and secure; thus, a new worldview is constructed. It is this disrupted schema of the traumatized parent that is transmitted to the children, influencing their basic assumptions, worldviews and beliefs (Ancharoff et al.,1998).

Projection of split-off parts

The traumatized parent may attempt to release his or her consciousness from tortured memories and emotions by means of repression and somatization. Fear of the return of persecution, blocked aggression, feelings of guilt, shame, and a damaged self-image, split off: The person is not capable of personally experiencing these feelings and characteristics as an integral part of the self. When such a person becomes a parent, his or her child is inevitably confronted with these split-off memories and emotions. One of the hazards is that the split-off part of the parent is projected onto the child (Op den Velde, 1998).

Möhler, Resch, Cierpka & Cierpka (2001) support this view by stating that parents tend to project unconscious material of their own past onto their infant, especially during the first months of life, unconsciously shaping the formation of the infant’s self.

Soft Bipolar: Vivid Thoughts, Mood Shifts and Swings, Depression, and Anxiety of the Mild Mood Disorders Affecting Millions of Americans. Cuttingedge help and information is now available on the misunderstood and often misdiagnosed milder mood disorders: Bipolar ll and Cyclothymia.You may have Soft Bipolar if you:Have vivid thoughts and emotionsHave variable periods of energy and productivityHave good times followed by periods of foggy depressionHave a relative with depression, a mood disorder, or alcoholismAre strongly affected by stress, relationships, changes of seasons, or lossesFeel you are bright, but for some reason are not meeting your potentialIf you can relate to any of these ideas, Soft Bipolar has further tools to understand your symptoms, including the new and innovative Soft Bipolar Symptom Self Report.There are things you can do about these disorders, and direction in finding qualified help is included.Where would we be without other resources? Soft Bipolar includes many internetcritical resource sites that offer vast amounts of help you can find today!Dr. Bunch wants you to understand why you have suffered and what you can do about the fears, anxieties, and depression of your Soft Bipolar disorder.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 26th, 2011 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Health Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

tommyny Says: March 27th, 2011 at 10:27 am This book made it easy to understand the so called soft, or lesser forms of bipolar, and how important it is to get treatment. I found it informative.

Atta ur Rahman Says: March 27th, 2011 at 3:57 pm I have worked in an inpatient Psychiatric/Behavioral Health unit for many years. Dr. Bunch really nails down what the problems are. His book presents new information for even a seasoned professional, yet the book is an easy read and simple enough to understand for anyone. Whether you yourself are suffering from bipolar or related to/friends with/in a relationship with someone with one of these disorders (i.e. everyone knows someone….whether they know it or not!)this is a MUST READ! You will gain a deeper understanding of the problems and issues people face, giving you a deeper ability to cope with or understand.Suffice it to say, I recommend this book.

jasser Says: March 27th, 2011 at 10:09 pm It is written in simple enough text to help our consumers understand the meaning of a mood disorder and how to cope with the symptoms. The examples, case studies, and charts are easy to incorporate into a group setting.

Chris Clark Says: March 30th, 2011 at 1:40 pm What I liked about this book is that the author is really an expert about soft bipolar. I’ve been suffering for more than 20 years and STILL have not been properly diagnosed, though I’ve seen many psychiatrists. I’m sure I’m suffering a form of soft bipolar, but this seems to be a problem most psychiatrists can’t even label, much less help. They will throw all kinds of medicine at it though — and just hope something sticks. I am glad to see someone pay attention to the various types of soft bipolar and pull all kinds of valuable information together in one book. My one caveat: all people like me want is HELP. The part about finding a good doctor or therapist — which is, in a nutshell, call around and ask a bunch of questions about their experience and background — is really too much to ask from someone suffering from this disorder. It’s hard to get organized; it’s hard to speak up for yourself; it’s hard to get to get to a doctor’s appointment at all in the best of times! I honestly can’t imagine any psychiatrist I’ve ever seen answering all these questions for someone who wasn’t already a patient. I would go anywhere and pay anything to see a doctor who had this much knowledge and empathy — there aren’t many out there. You deserve much more than 5 stars for that, Dr. Bunch.

Mark Bossert Says: March 30th, 2011 at 10:48 pm This book is one of the best i have read on the subject, i have even shared it with friends. It is very helpful and knowledgable. It is in easy to understand terms and suggestions.

Triggers are emotional, physical and psychological experiences that weaken your sense of well- being. Sometimes called stressors, triggers are best defined as powerful events that set into motion powerful responses. For many people, a difficult event or threatening interaction will “trigger” a relapse of depressive symptoms such as over-eating, isolation or obsessive thinking.

Learning what external events, toxic interactions, and even negative self-statements leave you vulnerable will help you offset a downward emotional spiral.

First, learn how to recognize the who, what, whys and whens of your emotional life. Start by looking at the calendar. Note dates that are meaningful or stressful for you, such as the holiday season or the anniversary of a divorce or death. Maybe it’s anxiety about a yearly physical exam, like a mammogram, or an annual family reunion that last time left you feeling emotionally raw. Noting difficult periods of the year allows you to anticipate and plan for threats to your well-being.

Consider all the hats you wear in your life. What circumstances at work affect your mood and behavior? At home, do certain actions of those around you tend to upset you? Are you feeling supported or overwhelmed? What happens when you don’t get enough “me” time? …